Shredder Challenge

In September 2010 the Obama Administration launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and the public can locate and tackle tough problems – and win cash prizes doing it. Two years later, 45 federal agencies have awarded more than $13.9 million in prize money in 205 challenges, with some 16,000 citizen “solvers” taking part in the competitions.

These impressive numbers demonstrate the impact made by the administration’s efforts to make incentive prizes a key part of agencies’ problem-solving and innovation arsenal, White House officials said. Keep reading →

What do the Green Bay Packers and the Army Installation Management Command have in common? They both use the same computer software to make critical decisions.

The Packers use decision-making software from Decision Lens Inc. to more systematically weigh a variety of criteria in evaluating potential draft picks. Depending on priorities, those decisions can often be too close to call. Keep reading →

Otavio Good, leader of the San Francisco-based team that won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Shredder Challenge earlier this month, doesn’t just do computer programming.

“I live it,” he told AOL Government in a telephone interview. Keep reading →

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Shredder Challenge” could be called the world’s ultimate jigsaw puzzle contest. But it was serious business for the nearly 9,000 teams of problem solvers from all over the world who entered the competition after DARPA officials launched it in late October.

In the Shredder Challenge competitors attempted to reconstruct machine-shredded documents in increasingly difficult stages to claim DARPA’s $50,000 prize. The challenge comprised five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the content of the documents and the technique employed to shred the documents varied to make the challenge progressively more difficult. Keep reading →